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Managing a busy office can be a bit overwhelming, especially if the business is booming. While it is a great feeling to have the business moving forward instead of backward,
it may seem like you’re running around all day long to keep up with everything. Phones ringing, emails piling up, Facebook comments waiting, and customers needing attention – all these things begin to add up when they’re not dealt with right away. That’s why it is so important to have an IT service desk to help facilitate your office work. Implementing a service help desk will streamline your business and boost productivity. What are the benefits of bringing an IT service desk? Here are five of the many perks that businesses will discover.

Benefits of a Service Help Desk:

Enhanced Efficiency

Every business desires to operate like a well-oiled machine. In other words, they want to hum along smoothly and effortlessly with every component doing its part. If you have to continually deal with slow-moving parts, breakdowns, or areas that start and stop, then you will not get all the work done that you need to get done. A service desk enhances your operation’s efficiency. It serves as a centralized location for all your customer service communications. A service desk is a customer service hub that allows the inflowing activity to come into one place. For example, if a customer calls or visits a website portal, they will be directed to the same service desk. If they send an email request or chat with a bot or agent, the information is redirected to the same service desk. A ticket is then created at the help desk making all requests in one place. This makes the workflow more efficient for the employees they don’t need to retrieve tickets from multiple locations and disperse them.

Seamless Experience

Customers want a seamless experience when they interact with your business. Customer service is a number one priority for many customers. In fact, over three-quarters of potential customers backed out of a sale because of a bad experience. It’s important to have a customer service experience that will be smooth and seamless in order to maintain customers. What does a seamless operation look like? Customers are met with a consistency wherever or however they contact the business, a business response is uniform across all platforms, and business response time is predictable allowing for SLAs. In addition, mobile users do not have any problems interacting with the website, ordering from the company, or dealing with customer service agents. Whether customers contact a business from their phone, laptop, or tablet, the experience should be the same. Or whatever place they reach out to shouldn’t matter either. When all of these factors work together, it creates a seamless experience.

Boosted Productivity

When your employees are able to do their work without snags and problems, then productivity increases. By implementing many of the automation features of a service desk, employees get the job done faster and with greater ease. Instead of sorting through information to see which tickets are the most important, a help desk prioritizes them for you. Spend less time communicating with the team about the task with the use of the task management feature on a help desk. Need to have a meeting or cancel a meeting, simply check off all the people who need to attend, select a meeting letter, tweak it a bit, and push send. It automatically adds it to everyone’s calendar once they accept the meeting. You need not worry about missing appointments or following up to be sure people are coming to your meeting. Your dashboard displays all the information for you.

Problem Resolution

If there is one thing that will keep a business from smoothly operating its problems. No one likes when things go wrong. Yet, problems are inevitable. It’s how they get solved that matters – and how quickly they are resolved. How does an IT help desk facilitate problem management? As incidents come into the help desk, they are tracked and analyzed. If too many come in that are in a particular area or category, that raises a red flag. At that point, management (of the department or the main manager) may decide to investigate further to see if there is a correlation between all the incidents. If so, then a larger problem is solved. Problem management features are embedded in the help desk to facilitate this process. For example, the team working on the problem has the ability to flag every individual incident that related to the problem so everyone understands what the root problem was. By documenting it through the system, it maps out what to do if future incidents occur.

Strengthened Library of Information

A vast library of information will be an advantage for your business, customers, and employees. Information about problems can be stored in the knowledge database. That saves valuable time and effort for the staff if future issues arise. In addition, your knowledge-base is an online plethora of information for your clients as well. You can download articles, any information you have created, and answers to common questions, and then publish it in the knowledge-base. Continue to add to the database and/or update it as necessary. Even set up a question and answer portal for customers to ask and answer one another. This saves you valuable time. Furthermore, a knowledge-base can be used internally for staff members too. Create a separate area in the help desk that staff can access to find information relating to their job. This may help with new employees or when implementing new changes.